Bad-Behavior Continues to Give the Finger to Comment Spammers

The brilliant brain behind Bad Behavior, the comment spam fighter that “gives the finger to comment spammers” before they gain access to your blog, is Michael Hampton.

Before I get more to bragging on my buddy, Michael, I’d like to announce that the latest update to Bad Behavior, version 2.09, has been released and version 2.1 is on its way with very exciting features.

Bad Behavior is a unique comment spam fighter. It’s goal is similar to Akismet and Spam Karma, but Bad Behavior stops known comment spammers from even getting into the door of your blog. It turns them away before they get a chance to post by testing IP addresses and other criteria to determine if they are human or machine, and shoots down the machines and known enemies of blogs.

Typically, the reasons you may be blocked are because you are using a proxy server, personal firewall, or some software that may be interfering with the commenting process. Some shared hosts, like GoDaddy, cause a lot of problems. Hampton offers a variety of ways to help you determine what is happening. Don’t give up on Bad Behavior. If it isn’t allowing you to comment on your own blog, then it is probably also catching your comments on other blogs. Find out why and get it fixed.

Used in combination with Akismet or Spam Karma, you have a very powerful combination of comment spam fighters. On my blogs, little ever gets through with these WordPress Plugins and tools.

Bad Behavior is not limited to WordPress. It also works on Drupal and many other blogging sites and forums. The next releases are planned to be even more platform-independent, expanding usage across the board to protect all types of sites and services from comment spam.

Hampton will also be splitting Bad Behavior into two branches, one for the commercial side and the other for the casual user and blogger. It’s an exciting time and Bad Behavior has remained a proven comment spam fighter and protector for three years (or longer?).

The Brilliant Michael Hampton

Fighting comment spam isn’t the only brilliance that comes from the brain of Michael Hampton, aka ioerror. Besides his Lunacy Unleashed WordPress.com blog where he currently covers news about Bad Behavior and WordPress topics, he is also the master of the delightful and provocative Homeland Stupidity, a site dedicated to the silliness of the United States attempt to fight the “war on terrorism”. Along with the silly things, Hampton brings to light the dangerously serious things the United States government is doing to protect US citizens while taking away their rights.

One recent post is called “War on Drugs targets asparagus?” in which he explains and points to proof that the United States war on drugs has succeeded in “eradicating thousands of acres of American asparagus” in their attempt to destroy drug crops. This is really funny, but it is also incredibly sad for two reasons. One, it’s our money going to waste, and two, I like asparagus.

On Monday the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a Ninth Circuit appeals court decision which found that Americans do not have a “right to travel by any particular form of transportation” and do not have the right to know the laws and regulations they must obey.

Huh? We need information like this because living in the US today is a messy game. Hampton’s Homeland Stupidity calls them on their BS and recently celebrated its second anniversary recently of helping us understand how dumb we’ve become.

Hampton’s battle against stupidity in the US government doesn’t stop. He’s determined to “make stupidity history”, so he also runs Make Stupidity History, another brilliantly funny and obvious stab at how useless some human beings are, especially when they “try” to be otherwise.

Unfortunately, all of Hampton’s energies are being directed towards more productive ventures, and Make Stupidity History is currently suspended, waiting for someone to take it over or buy it. It’s a brilliant blogging topic, so check in with him if you are interested.

Hampton doesn’t stop there. Besides his life, work with WordPress and Bad Behavior, and the popular Homeland Stupidity, his other blogs include Life With Linux, Phone Watch, and a few others I’m probably missing.

Hampton has also developed an interesting tool he calls “What is Your IP Address” which checks your IP address and tells you what it is, what your reverse and forward DNS resolves to, proxy server, and browser. It’s handy if you need that information.

Busy guy, but he’s also my hero. Hampton works behind the scenes to help Akismet and WordPress be the best it can be. So hugs and kudos to one of the best in the WordPress Community. Thanks, Michael!

Whenever you talk about this plug in, I go, download it and try to use it again… and everytime it happens… I get an error message saying I’m a spammer (in my own blog). I’ve read all the FAQs and stuff from the plugin page, but still, I can’t get it to work… I know this is isn’t the place to ask, but do you have any idea why this happens????

Thanks for the link to another great tool in the arsenal of Spam Freedom. I can’t even fathom what operating a blog would be like without tools like this (and Akismet). I also appreciate the link to Michael’s cool blog. Homeland Stupidity is a particular passion of mine!

I too quit using Bad Behavior when it considered me a spammer. Frankly, if even I can’t get past it, it’s not a risk I’m willing to take for my visitors.

Aside from that, I note it logs every single access attempt in the MySQL database. For me, this was logging upwards of a thousand attempts in a 24 hour period on some days. From looking at my logs, it seemed to me it may have been causing unnecessary cpu usage on the server by logging all these attempts — but I can’t say for sure.

I used to use Spam Karma and it let a lot of spam through. Then I switched to Akismet – alone – and it has done a marvelous job. It’s caught 48,660 spam comments since I first installed it, and has basically zero false positives anymore. I’m not too clear on why I would need both Akismet AND Bad Behavior…could you go into that a little more?

Michael, frankly I didn’t find it to be an issue worth emailing over. And yes, I’ve read the standard FAQ. I’m quite doubtful it’s my computer as I don’t use software proxies, and although it -could- be my host, it was working fine for awhile so I’m doubtful there.

BB works for some, and that’s great… but until it has less of a false positive rate, many folks aren’t going to feel comfortable using it.

My site is still in it’s infancy. I originally opened a blog hoping to post comments on my football team and discuss/share opinions.
Literally 2 weeks after going live….I had over 70 comments! Yippee I thought, now we’re talking. Alas, they were …nice blog…try viagra! And various other rubbish. So thank you for the heads up on this…if I can stop muppetts running their dumb blog spam software, I may be able to put the blog back up.
Cheers.

[…] Lorelle on WordPress talks about the merits of Bad Behavior a plugin I’ve been using per Erik’s suggestion. She’s is right. Bad Behavior in tandem with Akismet stops comment spam in it’s tracks. […]